The Saddest Sunday

I'm beginning a new blog today because...

1.
...I woke up an hour past noon with a weighty word from a forgettable dream:

Eclipse: the passing into the shadow of a celestial body; the total or partial obscuring of one celestial body by another; a falling into obscurity or decline

2.
...I'd just read something by P.W. Winnicott (quoted in The Dynamics of Creation) that makes sense to me, that explains my creative (and blog-writing) impulse:

"In the artist of all kinds I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends: the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found."

I think what fuels me now is the need to reveal what I believe to be important but to conceal the motivation for doing so, or at least to elide the labels and judgements that keep cropping up.

3.
...the Adrienne Rich poem quoted in my Seniors' Folio entry three years ago still resonates:

Delta
Adrienne Rich

If you have taken this rubble for my past
raking through it for fragments you could sell
know that I long ago moved on
deeper into the heart of the matter

If you think you can grasp me, think again;
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread

4.
...my sister-in-law is going back to San Francisco today after a 3-week visit. There's a half-empty bottle of cabernet sauvignon on the kitchen table, a big box of pasalubong in the living room, and a pile of DVD's (Batman Begins, Sin City, American Splendor, Eraserhead, Land of the Dead) on the TV. No doubt, when my brother arrives home tonight after taking her to the airport, he and I will watch one or two films (despite work tomorrow and papers to check) in an attempt to stave off our separate sadnesses.

5.
...I slept through Sunday morning. And I know I will forever miss freshly brewed coffee and crossword puzzles with answers in red and black ink, the empty boxes literal proofs that there are clues we cannot decode, answers that are not ours to give.

6.
...too many places I'd grown attached to (Cafe Kilimanjaro, Eyrie, Cafe Papemelroti, Figaro along Morato, and now Xavier Grille) have closed down, and I need a space to hold all those missing places together.

7.
...I do feel guilty about being a delinquent teacher this semester, but my heart's not in it anymore.

8.
...September has, for the past five years, been the most unforgiving.

9.
...four years ago, the World Trade Center in New York was attacked. Months later, I read a feature on this subway musician known simply as the WTC violinist, who had not been at his station that fateful day. He got reassigned to play at another station, constantly thinking about the commuters whose faces he would never see again. One day, a stranger who used to work at the WTC approached him and hugged him and cried, saying she was so happy he was still alive, that he had given her so many moments of joy during her daily commutes. Plenty of others came up to him after that, saying the same things: thank God you're still here, let's organize a concert, thank you, thank you.

I want to be like that anonymous and necessary violinist, whose music meant so much to strangers it spelled the difference between merely surviving and truly living.

10.
...the last track of Aimee Mann's Lost in Space album has been playing itself over and over in my mind.

It's Not

I keep going round and round on the same old circuit
A wire travels underground to a vacant lot
Where something I can't see interrupts the current
And shrinks the picture down to a tiny dot
And from behind the screen it can look so perfect
But it's not

So here I'm sitting in my car at the same old stoplight
I keep waiting for a change but I don't know what
So red turns into green turning into yellow
But I'm just frozen here on the same old spot
And all I have to do is to press the pedal
But I'm not
No, I'm not

People are tricky, you can't afford to show
Anything risky, anything they don't know
The moment you try, you kiss it goodbye

So baby kiss me like a drug, like a respirator
And let me fall into the dream of the astronaut
Where I get lost in space that goes on forever
And you make all the rest just an afterthought
And I believe it's you who could make it better
But it's not
No, it's not
No, it's not